Image credit: © Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports
Billy showed up on the first day and the kids all knew his name. While they hopped and darted around him, he began to feel at home. But it wasn’t long before their parents’ eyes narrowed with disgust.
He was too big, that Billy. And his bigness just maximized his full-body weirdness; his cumbersome torso; his incorrect face. His head alone weighed fifteen pounds.
It wasn’t his fault. He just showed up that way. Some guessed he was the result of swimming in chemically polluted waters or eating too much insecticide-rich mole cricket bait. Somewhere behind their hate, those parents couldn’t blame him. Same as they didn’t blame their own children for their genetic imperfections. They were just kids, after all.
Even Billy.
But they killed him anyway.
It had to be done. They couldn’t adjust to him, so they adjusted him. People can’t look at something they don’t understand for too long without doing their part to destroy it. Billy learned that just a couple of months after he was born. It wasn’t a pretty lesson. But he wasn’t a pretty fish.
“Billy the Marlin,” wrote Miami Herald columnist Greg Cote in 1993, “is the ugliest mascot in the history of professional sports.”
They yelled at him. Cursed at him. Grabbed his nose as he wandered through the upper deck. The coarser adults pointed and laughed. The more cowardly children fled–rumors were circulating that a few of them had been impaled on Billy’s nose. Jeff Conine didn’t know what the hell he was looking at the first time Billy came out of the tunnel, assuming he was a penguin or something.
But he was a nice kid. Kind. Just wanted to help. And to do so, he took an obvious first step: He showed up at the local library with a clown. There, he and Ronald McDonald encouraged children to read books over the summer—preferably ones that didn’t illustrate the correct anatomy of long, large-nosed marine fish of the family Istiophoridae. In fact, he told them, if they read 10 books by August, they’d get a pair of free Marlins tickets.
Would you like that, children? Would you like to come down to Joe Robbie Stadium and see Jeff Conine and the boys at the height of monsoon season?
The program may have been a rousing success, if only because of the children who, in their desperation to avert their gaze from his cavernous maw, fixed their eyes intently on the nearest page.
Unlike the 1993 Mets, the Marlins were a watchable product. Billy stood there in July, mouth gaped open in a silent scream, as the Marlins’ one millionth fan came through the turnstiles. The 29-year-old old woman was whisked away and given a shirt that labeled her “ONE MILLIONTH FAN,” so that she would be marked for life. Then, she was shoved onto the field where Billy was waiting.
They posed for a photo and he gave her two tickets to a Marlins game, possibly left over from the reading mandate Billy had issued the children of the city. This was said to be a “prize,” but, during a recent three-game set with the Rockies, the Marlins had played in front of their smallest crowd of the season for three consecutive games. Not even their millionth fan came back—there was some confusion about the tickets she’d won, leading to renegotiations with the team that both sides would call a “nightmare.” Eventually, she’d give them away.
Watchable? Sure. But nobody was watching.
Yet their eyes burned holes in Billy. Every repulsed stare that turned away from the ball club seemed to settle on the bunglesome ichthyoid, flopping in the torrid namesake of the Sunshine State.
What is that thing? they thought. And how do we kill it?
“Worst major league mascot?” wrote one columnist. “Billy the Marlin–no question. No contest.”
It was hard to take a shot at him, though. Thanks to the merriment of the Marlins’ newness and the novelty of their mascot’s malformedness, there was always someone else standing in the crosshairs. Marlins team partner Wayne Huizenga was photographed on the field before the Marlins’ inaugural game, clutching Billy in an embrace and celebrating, presumably, the beginning of the Marlins’ legacy in south Florida, as well as baseball’s thriving antitrust exemption.
But the love, often feigned, did little to stop the flood of hate spilling out of the stands and newspaper columns. The writers hated him for being too fat, marine biologists hated him for looking like the wrong fish, and everyone else hated him because he reminded them of The Penguin from Batman Returns.
So they put Billy under and hacked him apart.
By August, Billy was out from under the knife. The new Billy was slimmer and sleeker. The old Billy had died screaming. A propaganda video featuring the theme song from “Rocky” was played on the big screen at the ballpark, explaining that he had not been replaced—he was different now simply as a result of diet and exercise and putting on a tuxedo. The truth was they’d cut 50 pounds out of him to make him look more like a healthy marlin and less like a swordfish bloated with discarded plastic.
A day later, Phillies outfielder Pete Incaviglia dragged Billy out of the dugout and left him hogtied on the field, where he had to stand, still bound, through the national anthem. Something about assaulting Billy really brought out the best in the Phillies. John Kruk hit him with a few punches before a game and later that day got his 1,000th career hit.
Life expectancy grows ever shorter for sea creatures, especially those who choose to live on dry land. Death stalked Billy at every turn. While still a hatchling in 1993, he’d contracted pneumonia and torn a ligament in his knee celebrating a Miami Hurricanes win. As the countdown began for the end of his first brutal year, he took a stray bullet to the face while walking down a street in New Orleans.
But Billy did not just survive—he lived.
That winter, he was invited back to the sea. But not to be re-hogtied and shoved into the Gulf of Mexico. To be the grand marshal of the Boca Rotan Holiday Boat Parade.
The people who’d convinced themselves there wasn’t a bad seat at Joe Robbie Stadium had finally accepted that Billy was their friend.
Like kicking a fish onto dry land, when you force a situation on people, in time, heinous or not, they will accept it. Billy would ride the lead boat, the Isis, and for $60, you could sit right next to him. From the C-15 Canal to the Hillsboro Boulevard Bridge, you could gawk at the houses and condos all fighting for holiday decoration accolades. Then, together, you could judge the surrounding vessels for “best theme,” “best use of lights,” “most animated sailboat,” and “most beautiful powerboat.”
You and Billy.
A couple of pals.
Four years later they found his severed head on a retaining wall.
It was assumed some kids had found it first and kicked it around for a while before growing bored and leaving it within view of highway traffic. That Billy. He always did know how to keep children entertained.
The two guys who spotted Billy’s head as they drove by came to a screeching halt, tires squealing as they slammed the brakes. The head had been missing for months after it had been lost during a parachuting stunt gone wrong on Opening Day 1997.
Scientists have long wondered: What does a fish think of when it’s decapitated while sky-diving?
Does it think, this is the fate I deserve for having the hubris to leap from the sea to the sky?
No. No, it is far more likely that the goodness of Billy’s life flickered through his troubled mind as his head flew off toward the Florida Turnpike. Like the day he’d visited a sick child attending his first ever Major League Baseball game and signed an autograph for him. The kid had grabbed Billy’s nose and gave it a kiss, whispering, “Thank you” in his ear.
Or the young Cuban boy who’d squealed with laughter while visiting the Marlins locker room, nowhere near as impressed by the players as he’d been with Billy, who he’d thought was a shark.
Billy’s life had been full of screamed curses and riddled with bullets; cutting remarks and snide columnist musings. He may have been too rotund to cross the gulf, but he was never the abomination he’d been to the torch-wielding mobs.
There is nothing more adult than hate; a concept planted by example and grown through fear. But younger eyes see the world through the gaze of acceptance, whether they’re looking at Jeff Conine or a 50-pound fish trying to get them to dance. Baseball is a game for children, not because of what it is or how it’s played, but because they are the only ones who deserve it.
Fortunately, Billy survived the fall. The Marlins fastened his head back on and went on to win the World Series. Billy traveled to Tallahassee with Wayne Huizenga, a man he’d once taught to do the hokey-pokey before they’d performed it together on the field, and saw a team-signed ball enshrined behind government glass.
Marlins All-Star catcher Charles Johnson traveled back to his hometown to be honored by the community. In a speech delivered on the 50-yard line of a local football field, beneath the pastel splashes of the Florida twilight, Johnson said, “To every little boy and girl, if you have a dream, believe in it and stick with it.”
Marlins fans begged team ownership to stick with it, too. They’d gotten a taste of glory and it tasted way better than sixth place. Now that a title had been secured, their next request was to keep the team that had won it together.
One local woman wrote to a local paper, begging: “The powers that be need to realize that it’s not the teal and black uniform, Billy the Marlin, or the song ‘Everybody’s Doing the Fish,’ that we all fell in love with…It’s who is wearing those uniforms that matters. We want the team we fell in love with, or something close to it.”
The adults running the Marlins responded by getting rid of all of their best players and finished the following season with the worst record in baseball.
After his speech, Johnson wrapped his mother in a hug as they both overflowed with the joyful emotions of the day. And behind them stood Billy, his massive, always-staring eyes fixed in another direction. He was looking ahead to another year of ceremonies, presentations, and exhibits; fundraisers, parades, and events.
He wasn’t a penguin or a swordfish or a carcass bloated with gas. And when ownership’s fire sale burned out, he was one of the only pillars still standing.
He was Billy the f***ing Marlin.
And this was his town now.
Thank you for reading
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